Wheaton College students James Kibbie and Alex Vlaisavich were aboard a fishing boat off the coast of Fort Meyers, Florida, when they received the news. “We ask undergraduate students to remain or return home for the remainder of the semester,” wrote Philip Ryken, the president of the Chicago-area liberal arts school, in a March 11 email announcing that, effective immediately, remaining classes would be held online only. As America collectively grappled with the new reality of coronavirus, Kibbie, a junior studying economics, and Vlaisavich, a sophomore business major, returned to shore and devised a plan to salvage their upside-down semester. “We got the table flipped on us, and were hoping to negotiate something that makes this a more reasonable experience,” Vlaisavich told me during a phone interview while self-quarantining in his Washington State home.

Their petition for Wheaton to adopt pass-fail grading was one of the first of its kind to appear on Change.org, but the movement has quickly spread as universities have become embroiled in grading controversies amid the sudden and near-total shift online. Over the past two weeks, a myriad of similar appeals have cropped up all across the country. So far, several dozen major universities have adopted a form of the pass-fail system. Wheaton is not one of them, though Kibbie said some professors are taking it upon themselves to give their students A’s with completed coursework. But the movement born there has taken on a life of its own, sweeping across the country via social media and word of mouth as colleges and universities struggle to land on a new normal.

“Colleges and universities have a moral obligation to lead the general public to the understanding that we are on a war footing against a common enemy, and we need to pull together,” Allison Stanger, a visiting professor at Harvard University, wrote in an email, noting that “the very least” educators can do is implement a pass-fail system. “We assume that there is a level playing field for students when we bring them together on campus, even though it isn’t the case, but it is a bridge too far to maintain that assumption in a global pandemic.” (Harvard announced Friday it had adopted its own pass-fail system.)

Jenny Davidson, a humanities professor at Columbia University, said she was “comfortable giving everybody an A” at the end of the semester. “There is so much pressure on those kids right now,” said Davidson, whose Manhattan campus falls in America’s coronavirus epicenter. “And as faculty, we just can’t let it be that we’re contributing to pressure rather than giving some relief from it.” Davidson, whose goal now is to support her classes beyond addressing grading concerns, has experience when it comes to leading students through crisis. “When 9/11 happened, it was my second year as an assistant professor at Columbia,” she said, adding that the two incidents “emotionally feel kind of similar.”

Perhaps the biggest problem students face is sheer logistics, as those returning home fly across the country or the world amid a tangle of closures; prioritize their health and that of their families; maintain a stable internet connection, home classroom, and study space; and try to stay afloat through financial difficulties. Another major issue is a lack of consistency in grading policies. The litany of options being floated includes student optional pass-fail; pass-no credit, in which a failing mark is not held against a student’s record; credit-no credit, in which a student receives course credit if they pass but no credit if they fail, while the grade won’t factor into their GPA either way; pass-no record, which clears all failing grades from transcripts; and double A, which automatically gives students an A or A-minus should they complete a course in its entirety. Schools also differ in their definition of passing and failing grades. At the University of California, a C or C-minus is passing, while anything lower is a fail, according to the Los Angeles Times, but at the University of Louisville, one of the first schools to decide on a student optional pass-fail system, a D-minus qualifies as a passing grade, its provost said.

Advertisement

The global pandemic has created a bizarre dichotomy for students and faculty attempting to help each other through the crisis: social distancing guidelines mandate separation, even as they must come together to work through impending problems. Social media lets them achieve both. But the organizing methods that work for some students don’t always translate for others. Cameron Sheehy, a sophomore at Vanderbilt University who started his school’s successful push for a pass-fail option, said he shared his Change.org petition with nearly a thousand peers by posting it in Vanderbilt’s class of 2022 GroupMe, an app that allows users to communicate in the same chatroom, as well as his school’s Students for Sanders GroupMe. “Within a couple of days, it had reached over 1,000 signatures,” he said.

Aran Chang, a senior at Johns Hopkins University, got a vastly different response when sharing his school’s grading petitions to various GroupMes. “There were 300 people all arguing over what to do at the same time,” he said, describing the organizing attempt as “a bit of a shit show.” Chang and his fellow organizers found success in a more unorthodox approach, sharing their petitions in the “extremely active” Johns Hopkins meme page “Jooby Hooby,” which has 17,000 members, many of whom signed onto and shared Chang’s petition. (On Friday, John Hopkins announced a "Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grading policy for all undergraduate students enrolled in ongoing Spring 2020 courses.")

Faculty and university administrators are turning to Facebook groups of their own to navigate the ever-changing semester. Columbia’s Davidson commended “pedagogy Facebook groups” for giving instructors a community space, while those with significant online teaching experience are posting about best practices. “These conversations that are happening online now are incredibly valuable,” she said. Davidson has also used online platforms to help students pushing for grade changes; Chang noted that “Professor Davidson was literally the first person [Johns Hopkins organizers] actually went to for advice.”

Beth Boehm, the University of Louisville provost, said her faculty has “embraced” changes to grading methods and curriculum, despite the fact that few have experience with online courses. “Some are saying, ‘Okay, so how do you implement this?’ But they’re not complaining about what I think is a compassionate act toward students,” Boehm said. She noted that in her mind, “a pass is a pass this semester and that shows our students were applying themselves and were resilient.” While addressing student concerns about the negative impact transcripts with pass grades could have on internship and post-graduate opportunities, Boehm highlighted this school year’s unparalleled circumstances. “I keep calling it the semester with an asterisk, right—it will forever be a semester with an asterisk,” she said. “I don’t think that anybody is going to hold a P [pass] against a student. I just cannot imagine that. I know it won’t happen here.”

The economic fallout of the pandemic is crippling the advertising business, as Gannett furloughs staff, BuzzFeed cuts pay, and the Tampa Bay Times reduces printing. Coronavirus has led to a surge in readership—and an existential threat.

The pandemic has upended traditional campaigning and may play a major role in voters’ decisions. The question for those running in 2020, says one Congressman, will be “how did you perform in the great crisis?”